NORWAY
Psychiatric tests for attacker
A bow-and-arrow attack in Norway that left five people dead this week appears to have been motivated by mental illness, authorities said on Friday, as the perpetrator was ordered to be kept in a medical facility. Espen Andersen Brathen, a 37-year-old Danish citizen who converted to Islam and is believed to have been radicalized, has confessed to the Wednesday killings. He was in custody in a medical facility on Friday pending a psychiatric evaluation. “The strongest hypothesis after the first days of the investigation is that illness is in the background,” police inspector Per Thomas Omholt told reporters on Friday. However, police are keeping other possibilities open, and have investigated a range of motives including “anger, revenge, impulse, jihad, illness and provocation,” Omholt said. The psychiatric evaluation could take several months. “This indicates that things are not exactly as they should be,” his lawyer Fredrik Neumann said, referring to his client’s mental health.
UNITED KINGDOM
Elton John still standing
Elton John has scored his first No. 1 single in 16 years, in the same week he underwent a successful hip replacement. The 74-year-old topped the UK chart with Cold Heart, a collaboration with Dua Lipa remixed by Pnau, in which a string of classic Elton songs — Sacrifice, Kiss the Bride, Where’s the Shoorah and Rocket Man — are finessed into a new disco-pop track. It is Elton’s eighth No. 1. His previous chart-topper was 2005’s Ghetto Gospel, a posthumous 2Pac track produced by Eminem that samples Elton’s song Indian Sunset. Earlier this week, the Official Charts Company confirmed that Cold Heart’s success made Elton the first solo artist to have Top 10 hits in six decades.
UNITED STATES
Parkland shooter to plead
The man who killed 14 students and three staff members at a Parkland, Florida, high school is to plead guilty to their murders, his attorneys said on Friday, bringing some closure to a South Florida community more than three years after an attack that sparked a nationwide movement for gun control. The guilty plea would set up a penalty phase where Nikolas Cruz, 23, would be fighting against the death penalty and hoping for life without parole. Cruz attorney David Wheeler told Circuit Judge Elizabeth Scherer that he would plead guilty on Wednesday to 17 counts of first-degree murder in the February 2018 shooting at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School. The pleas would come with no conditions and prosecutors still plan to seek the death penalty.
UNITED STATES
Mass of snakes under home
Sonoma County Reptile Rescue Director Al Wolf is used to clearing one or two snakes from under houses, but recently was called by a woman who said she had seen rattlesnakes slither under her Northern California house and was surprised to find more than 90 rattlesnakes getting ready to hibernate. Wolf said he crawled under the home in Santa Rosa and found a rattlesnake right away, then another and another. He got out from under the house, grabbed two buckets, put on long safety gloves and went back in. He crawled on his hands, knees and stomach, tipping over more than 200 small rocks. “I kept finding snakes for the next almost four hours,” Wolf said on Friday. “I thought: ‘Oh, good, it was a worthwhile call,’ but I was happy to get out because it’s not nice, you run into spider webs and dirt and it smells crappy and it’s musty and you’re on your belly and you’re dirty. I mean it was work.”
AUSTRALIA
Tractor chase wreaks havoc
A thief in a tractor has led police on a destructive chase after allegedly stealing motorbikes from a shop front. Queensland police released dramatic footage of the moment a farm vehicle ploughed into a motorbike store’s window early Friday morning in Ipswich. Police said the driver attached two motorbikes to a boom on the front of the vehicle before driving off. However, as he attempted to flee police vehicles, the boom and the two bikes dropped onto the road. The tractor then hurtled along roads and damaged fences before crashing through a gate onto a rail line. Trains were stopped as the vehicle fled along the railway, cut through bushland and backyards before eventually sliding into a tree. The man then ran away, but was tracked and detained by police.
INDONESIA
River cleaners drown
Eleven students drowned and 10 others were rescued during a school outing for a river cleanup in West Java Province, officials said yesterday. About 150 students from an Islamic junior-high school on Friday participated in the cleanup along the Cileueur River when 21 of them slipped into the water, officials said. “The weather was good, and there was no flash flood,” Bandung Search and Rescue Office head Deden Ridwansyah said. “Those children who drowned were holding each other’s hands. One of them slipped and the others followed,” he said. Nearby residents and a rescue team saved 10 students, who were sent to a nearby hospital. All students were accounted for when the search ended.
INDONESIA
Three die in Bali quake
A moderately strong earthquake and an aftershock hit the island of Bali early yesterday, killing at least three people and destroying dozens of homes. The quake caused people to run outdoors in a panic, striking just after the island had begun to reopen to tourism as the COVID-19 pandemic wanes. The US Geological Survey said the magnitude 4.8 quake was centered 62km northeast of Singaraja. Its shallow depth of 10km might have amplified the amount of damage. Photographs from the island showed homes buried in rocks, mud and buildings collapsed, and walls splintered on the ground. Apart from the three confirmed dead, at least seven people were reported with head injuries or broken bones.
CHINA
Audible taken off App Store
Amazon’s audiobook service Audible and smartphone apps for reading the holy books of Islam and Christianity have disappeared from the Apple App Store in China, the latest examples of effects of the country’s tightened rules for internet firms. Audible on Friday said it removed its app last month “due to permit requirements.” The makers of apps for reading and listening to the Koran and Bible say their apps have also been removed at the government’s request.
ASEAN
Junta leaders banned
Southeast Asian countries have agreed to exclude the leader of Myanmar’s junta from a big ticket summit later this month, a rare and decisive move to hold the regime accountable for worsening civil strife in the country and refusing to engage with its political opponents. Myanmar, controlled by the junta led by Min Aung Hlaing since a February coup, made insufficient progress on an agreement struck with the bloc, ASEAN said yesterday.
‘CHILD PORNOGRAPHY’: The doll on Shein’s Web site measure about 80cm in height, and it was holding a teddy bear in a photo published by a daily newspaper France’s anti-fraud unit on Saturday said it had reported Asian e-commerce giant Shein (希音) for selling what it described as “sex dolls with a childlike appearance.” The French Directorate General for Competition, Consumer Affairs and Fraud Control (DGCCRF) said in a statement that the “description and categorization” of the items on Shein’s Web site “make it difficult to doubt the child pornography nature of the content.” Shortly after the statement, Shein announced that the dolls in question had been withdrawn from its platform and that it had launched an internal inquiry. On its Web site, Le Parisien daily published a
China’s Shenzhou-20 crewed spacecraft has delayed its return mission to Earth after the vessel was possibly hit by tiny bits of space debris, the country’s human spaceflight agency said yesterday, an unusual situation that could disrupt the operation of the country’s space station Tiangong. An impact analysis and risk assessment are underway, the China Manned Space Agency (CMSA) said in a statement, without providing a new schedule for the return mission, which was originally set to land in northern China yesterday. The delay highlights the danger to space travel posed by increasing amounts of debris, such as discarded launch vehicles or vessel
RUBBER STAMP? The latest legislative session was the most productive in the number of bills passed, but critics attributed it to a lack of dissenting voices On their last day at work, Hong Kong’s lawmakers — the first batch chosen under Beijing’s mantra of “patriots administering Hong Kong” — posed for group pictures, celebrating a job well done after four years of opposition-free politics. However, despite their smiles, about one-third of the Legislative Council will not seek another term in next month’s election, with the self-described non-establishment figure Tik Chi-yuen (狄志遠) being among those bowing out. “It used to be that [the legislature] had the benefit of free expression... Now it is more uniform. There are multiple voices, but they are not diverse enough,” Tik said, comparing it
RELATIONS: Cultural spats, such as China’s claims over the origins of kimchi, have soured public opinion in South Korea against Beijing over the past few years Chinese President Xi Jinping (習近平) yesterday met South Korean counterpart Lee Jae-myung, after taking center stage at an Asian summit in the wake of US President Donald Trump’s departure. The talks on the sidelines of the APEC gathering came the final day of Xi’s first trip to South Korea in more than a decade, and a day after his meeting with the Canadian prime minister that was a reset of the nations’ damaged ties. Trump had flown to South Korea for the summit, but promptly jetted home on Thursday after sealing a trade war pause with Xi, with the two
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